[In the following essay, Gebhard enumerates culturally subversive qualities in otherwise sentimental representations of white Southern gentlemen in the literature of the New South.]

[Colonel Grangerford] was a gentleman all over. … His hands was long and thin, and every day of his life he put on a clean shirt and a full suit from head to foot made out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at it.

—Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

He had been a colonel in the Confederate army, and still maintained, with the title, the military bearing which had always accompanied it. His hair and mustache were white and silky, emphasizing the rugged bronze of his face. He was tall and thin, and wore his coats padded, which gave a fictitious breadth and depth to his shoulders and chest. … Edna was glad to be rid of her father when he finally took himself off with … his padded shoulders, his Bible reading, his “toddies” and ponderous oaths.

—Kate Chopin, The Awakening

[Colonel Romulus Fields] represented a fair type of that social order which had existed in rank perfection over the blue-grass plains of Kentucky during the final decades of the old régime. … the inhabitants of that region had spent the most nearly idyllic life, on account of the beauty of the climate, the richness of the land, the spacious comfort of their homes, the efficiency of their Negroes, and the characteristic contentedness of their dispositions. Thus nature and history combined to make them a peculiar class, a cross between the aristocratic and the bucolic, being as simple as shepherds and as proud as kings.

—James Lane Allen, “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky”

The range of my epigraphs is one index of the popularity of “the Colonel” as a postbellum reincarnation of the Cavalier or planter-aristocrat, the epitome of southern masculinity according to tradition.¹ With or without the white suit, he was ubiquitous in American fiction after the Civil War: in his ramrod posture, his integrity verging on absurdity, and above all in his unfailing sense of his own dignity, he embodied (white) southern male honor and pride, still intact despite Appomattox. Yet the postwar resurrection of this stock figure of antebellum legend does not in any simple way represent a reassertion of white supremacy or of the southern aristocratic values of masculine honor and valor bound up with race as well as class hierarchies. Indeed, what is striking about this figure of the Colonel is the excessive, overblown quality of so many representations of him, even in the work of the most sincere defenders of the Old South. For the unnatural stiffness that Twain burlesques in Colonel Grangerford and the padded authoritarianism that Chopin satirizes in Edna's Protestant patriarch of a father are clearly kin to the sentimental heroes of Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, and others.

Allen's Kentucky Colonel, for example, seems intended to be read “straight,” that is, as a nonironic embodiment of the best in southern manhood, unlike Twain's or Chopin's Colonels. Yet Allen's figure, like so many others, is similarly marked by the extravagance, the posturing, that characterizes more ironic postwar literary representations of southern white men of the upper class. The glamour and pathos that surround these figures, especially dramatized through their sentimental relations with their manservants, I will argue, call into question any reductive reading of their appeal to the white mainstream, both North and South. The ideological work performed by such figures in late nineteenth-century American culture is neither simple nor trivial.²

In the guise of depicting the aging or sometimes deceased white master, still faithfully served or remembered by one devoted ex-slave, southern-identified male authors sought to renegotiate their generation's ideals of masculinity and patriotism in the aftermath of the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction. Slavery is repudiated, but not white supremacy, in narratives that both reveal and conceal white guilt, and allegiance to nation is refashioned along similarly unreconstructed lines. The result is often a paradoxically homoerotic as well as homophobic vindication of traditional southern male values, with southern white women put firmly back on the pedestal of an impossible purity. Black women, too, when they appear, play the familiar roles of “mammy” or of willing sexual partners. However, in the now-familiar triangular structure of desire mapped by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, female bodies only exist to serve or to connect men; the important relationships celebrated in stories like “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky” are between men.³ Yet these fictional pairings of master and slave in complex ways mediated not only southern but also national fantasies about race and power. Thus, reconstructing southern manhood becomes not merely a regional project but one with wider implications in an era, as Elaine Showalter has named it, of “sexual anarchy.”⁴

In The Epistemology of the Closet Sedgwick locates a crisis in the figuration of gender and identity, beginning in the 1880s, marked by the displacement of an earlier mode of sentimental representation that foregrounded the female body. In the place of the feminine and the female body—one thinks inevitably of “Little Eva” on her deathbed in Uncle Tom's Cabin—the male body appears instead.⁵ According to Sedgwick, these images of white men in pitiable postures signal an important historical shift: “What their persistence and proliferation dramatize is something new: a change of gears, occupying the period from the 1880s through the First World War, by which the exemplary instance of the sentimental ceases to be a woman per se, but instead becomes the body of a man who … physically dramatizes, embodies for an audience that both desires and cathartically identifies with him, a struggle of masculine identity with emotions or physical stigmata stereotyped as feminine.” She even suggests that “antisentimentality” is often inextricably linked to the sentimental: “Nietzsche says, ‘With hard men, intimacy is a thing of shame—and’ (by implication: therefore) ‘something precious.’”⁶

The postwar Reconstruction fiction that displays to the reader male figures like the Colonel, a once powerful white man brought low, a figure, moreover, with whom the reader is expected to identify, is also, I will argue, implicated in this nexus of sentimental/antisentimental relations analyzed by Sedgwick. Although Thomas Wentworth Higginson most likely did not literally cry over the story of the death of the young master in “Marse Chan,” as has been claimed, he, like many in the 1880s, had come to believe that Page's narrative of slavery was closer to the truth than Harriet Beecher Stowe's.⁷ That Higginson, once a militant abolitionist, commander of a black regiment, and an advocate of Radical Reconstruction, had come to sympathize with Page's sentimental renderings of master-slave relations does, however, indicate a great cultural shift.⁸

The spectacle of the white man's body in a scene designed to evoke tears and admiration placed readers in a sentimental relation to a site that had formerly been reserved for women and slaves; the “sentimental” pathos of these scenes, however, must have been not only pleasurable but also on some level troubling: men in such positions and such scenes evoked the threat of emasculation, destabilizing conventional understandings of gender and race differences. Sedgwick suggests that the new focus on the male body, part of a larger “modernist crisis of individual identity and figuration itself,” brought into play a “relatively new problematics of kitsch, of camp, and of nationalist and imperialist definition.”⁹ I will tease out some implications of this modern problematics of representation, revisiting the Plantation Myth to argue that reconstructing white, southern masculinity is a project that must be understood as enmeshed in a fin-de-siècle crisis of sexual definition, postwar race relations, and the emergence of a modern American nationalism. Nevertheless, the masculinist “sentimental power” of such representations should not be underestimated; not until the 1960s was “the sentimentalist image of the plantation and slavery” probably tarnished “beyond recovery.”¹⁰

That the social life of the Old South had its faults I am far from denying. What civilization has not? But its virtues far out-weighed them; its graces were never equalled. … It has maintained the supremacy of the Caucasian race, upon which all civilization seems now to depend.

—Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia before the War

Critics have long remarked upon the surprising vitality of the Plantation Myth, in particular, its remarkable upsurge in popularity in the 1880s following the collapse of Radical Reconstruction. “The plantation underwent, then, in the ebullient writings of authors who never knew it or of those who remembered it in a passion of loyalty, a sea-change ‘into something rich and strange,’” commented Francis Pendleton Gaines in 1924, perhaps the first to mark the excessive, phantasmagoric qualities of the postwar transformation of the favorite myth of the Old South.¹¹ The contradictions of the postwar craze for things southern in the North, mirrored by the contradictions of the New South, have been accounted for most ably and influentially by C. Vann Woodward: “The deeper the involvements in commitments to the New Order, the louder the protests of loyalty to the Old.”¹² Even the planter-aristocrat, seemingly the figure most resistant to fitting into a new, industrializing order, was nevertheless rehabilitated; according to Woodward, “The fabled Southern aristocracy, long on its last legs, was refurbished, its fancied virtues and vices, airs and attitudes exhumed and admired.”¹³ Most recently, Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., following Woodward, has argued in Yeoman versus Cavalier for what he calls “the abiding power of the Cavalier Myth,” contending that well into the twentieth century white southerners were “unwilling to surrender the cherished conception of the South as a region inhabited by an aristocratic, honorable, and superior race of men.”¹⁴ Yet as astute as the analysis of the “divided South” proposed by Woodward and those who have followed him is, it does not fully account for the “rich and strange” character of the postwar Plantation Myth. And it does not explain the potency of what was so transparently a fantasy of white, male power. Yet it is precisely from the excessive, extravagant aspects that these fictions derive both their energy and their long-lived popularity.

These excesses, linked to the sentimental focus on the male body, make room for the fantasy both of mastery and of being forgiven for wielding power, yet not without courting melodrama and camp. Critics have often underscored the melodrama that marks so much post-Reconstruction writing.¹⁵ What is less obvious is how writers employed humor to deflect the threat of emasculation that arises when men take the place of women and slaves as objects of sentimental identification. This humor, at odds with the sentimental scenario, functions like a Freudian slip, registering the text's unease at the spectacle of men behaving like, or asking the audience to relate to them as, women. The humor, as well as the extravagant sentimentality of these fictions, at times even veers toward camp.

Camp, as Susan Sontag has shown us, is a multifarious and elusive phenomenon.¹⁶ Although she suggests that camp is usually associated with the urban, the self-conscious, and even the private code, features that seem incompatible with the work of writers like Page, Allen, and Smith,¹⁷ camp also, she contends, may take a quite different form: “One must distinguish between naive and deliberate camp. … The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.”¹⁸ Her analysis implies that the producer of this form of camp remains unaware of the mix of “the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the native” in his work.¹⁹ From this perspective, the latent camp meanings of a work may have been invisible to its maker though nevertheless part of its appeal to contemporary, and especially later, audiences. In other words, men like Page and Allen did not set out to produce camp representations of southern masculinity; Page especially was “dead serious” about rewriting antebellum history.²⁰ Allen, however, I will suggest later, goes in the direction of deliberate camp. Whatever their intentions, by substituting male bodies for female ones—for example, in teary deathbed scenes—these writers inevitably became entangled in a crisis of representing masculine as well as national identity, whereby sentimentality in the late nineteenth century intersected not only with varieties of melodrama but also with those of camp.

The politics of camp, it is also worth noting, are as various as its diverse manifestations; David Bergman points out that writers usually argue “either for the disruptive potential of camp or for its ability to be co-opted by and integrated with oppressive forces.”²¹ Sontag sees camp as primarily apolitical; Philip Core wants to associate camp with a singular kind of heroism, those in the minority braving “the world's brutal laughter” with outrageous displays.²² Nevertheless, he also sees that “nostalgia for a world its viewers can never know” provides the impulse for “a variety of mass camp,” a form of camp that plays well to repressive, mainstream fantasies about “the beauty of a noble past” that give the lie to a less palatable history of oppression.²³ Camp, according to Andrew Ross, often marks the dethroning of an earlier mode of production that, though it “has lost its power to dominate cultural meanings,” is freshly available to be refashioned to meet contemporary needs.²⁴ For a postwar South whose slave economy was forever broken, a South, moreover, determined to exploit its industrial potential, the planter or Colonel asserting his own honor to a fantastic degree was bound to function as an ambiguous symbol, dangerously close to camp. The excesses characterizing such postwar representations suggest that the desire to reassert an unblemished southern manhood was undermined by a tacit recognition that the Old South had truly lost its way.

The symbolic signs of emasculation often accompanying the figure of the old master—his age, frailty, incapacity to adapt to the new, or his blindness, figural or literal—are everywhere. In Page's “Marse Chan,” for example, the “ole marster” is blinded trying to rescue a slave he had ordered into a burning barn, and Smith's Colonel Carter of Cartersville is so hopelessly inept at business and even paying his own bills that his body servant describes him as “nuffin' but a chile.”²⁵ Intensifying these stereotypical signs of male impotence is often another kind of effeminacy: his dandyism. Allen notes that “a subtle evidence of deterioration in manliness” of his Colonel Fields is the way “he had taken to dress.”²⁶ Even dapper dress—usually described in detail—becomes not only a marker of the aristocratic leisure of such a man, however shabby his surroundings, but also of his “feminine” separation from “normal” forms of masculine labor.

Although Ross reads the camp of the 1960s as self-consciously democratic, he points out that “the pseudoaristocratic patrilineage of camp can hardly be understated.”²⁷ The “aristocratic affections” of the intellectual who produces camp, he concludes, “are increasingly a sign of his disqualification, or remoteness from power, because they comfortably symbolize, to the bourgeoisie, the declining power of the foppish aristocracy, while they are equally removed from the threatening, embryonic power of the popular classes.”²⁸ As I have suggested, the latent camp aspects of late nineteenth-century southern rewritings of the Plantation Myth were not the product of self-consciousness, nor were they a sign of a democratic politics. To men like Thomas Nelson Page and Francis Hopkinson Smith, “aristocratic” lineage was no joke; both men traced their ancestry to prominent old Virginia families. (The ancestor for whom Smith was named was a singer of the Declaration of Independence.)²⁹ James Lane Allen's claims to a noble heritage, like those of many Kentuckians, however, were based more on imagined than real connections to the legendary Virginia aristocracy.³⁰ Of course, any American's claim to be descended from English bluebloods was fundamentally paradoxical in a nation established on the proposition that all men are created equal, as even Page admitted, in attempting to explain the credo of a “Virginia gentleman”: “He believed in a democracy, but understood that the absence of a titled aristocracy had to be supplied by a class more virtuous than he believed any aristocracy to be. He purposed in his own person to prove that this was practicable.”³¹ For men like Page and Allen, only boys during the Civil War, their identification with, as well as distance from, their Colonels must be grasped as a complex ideological performance. By clinging to outmoded figures of southern masculinity, these southern writers represented their distance from Yankee power and simultaneously registered their resentment. By flaunting the old, these writers also signaled their alienation from working-class southern white men as well as money-grubbing Yankees. Colonel Carter puts a New York grocer in his place by a sheer show of manners; the grocer is so “overawed” that he leaves without collecting the money the Colonel owes him (77). Allen's Colonel fails in business after the war because his “mind could not come down to the low level of such ignoble barter” (111). At the same time, these writers acknowledged, though perhaps not consciously, that this ideal of southern manhood had indeed become outmoded, if not obsolete, through the extravagant, even at moments bordering on camp, style in which his character is written.

The cultural anxieties raised by the specter of white southern manhood no longer relevant and possibly even ridiculous in the modern world, however, were quelled by another crucial figure, who makes possible the foregrounding of the white, male body as an object of sentimental desire. This figure, who supports these texts' insistent claims that white, southern men are members of an aristocratic, superior race, is the loyal body servant, the black man celebrated for staying on to serve his “master” long after emancipation. The peculiar sentimentality attached to keeping up this “brave pantomime” (119), in Allen's words, of master-slave relations, especially as sanctified by the tears of a black man, suggests that complex ideological work is going on: under the aegis of telling the “truth” about slavery, new ideological solutions to gender, race, and national identity are being put forward. The fact that these stories of faithful ex-slaves were popular with northern editors and readers also argues that postwar representations of homosocial bonding between white and black men cannot be dismissed as only the fantasies of would-be southern aristocrats bent on carrying on the Cause in a literary realm.³² It is, then, to the “sentimental” portraits of relations between ex-masters and ex-slaves that we now turn.

The life about the place was amazing. There were … the boys of the family mingling with the little darkies as freely as any other young animals, and forming the associations which tempered slavery and made the relation one not to be understood save by those who saw it.

—Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia before the War

In almost every story about the special relation between a southern gentlemen and his manservant, there is a critical moment when a black man cries. Yet he cries, not for himself, but for his master. Near the end of Allen's “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky,” when the old master, Colonel Fields, is on his deathbed, his manservant Peter weeps copiously: “‘Oh, Marse Rom!’ cried Peter, hiding his face, his whole form shaken by sobs” (130). Chad (short for “Nebuchadnezzar”) sheds tears at the prospect of his old master's bankruptcy; he explains to the narrator of Smith's Colonel Carter of Cartersville: “I can't hab nuffin' happen to de fambly, Major. You know our folks is quality, an' always was, an' I dasent look my mistress in de face if anythin' teches Marsa George” (60). In “Marse Chan,” often taken as the quintessential postwar plantation fiction, Sam—the black man assigned to serve his master almost from birth—tells how he cried when he brought his young master's body home from the war: “I couldn' see, I wuz cryin' so myse'f, an' ev'ybody wuz cryin'” (37). Although the tears here are provoked by the spectacle of the untimely as well as gallant death death of the young man, Sam's self-confessed tears are often more generalized to represent his sincere mourning for the Old South. Perhaps the most widely quoted lines from Page's In Ole Virginia are these: “Dem wuz good ole times, marster—de bes' Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac! Niggers didn' hed nothin' 't all to do” (10).³³ Although in the narrative, the time to which they most directly refer is that of Sam's childhood, the tenor of the story invites us to read these lines, as they have so often been read, as evidence that slavery was not the evil institution that abolitionists said it was.

Of course, these tales made no secret of their desire to challenge the story of slavery told by Harriet Beecher Stowe and others. James Lane Allen had even originally written his “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky” to go with a nonfiction companion piece, “Mrs. Stowe's ‘Uncle Tom’ at Home in Kentucky,” to correct the view that a true Kentucky gentlemen would have ever been capable of selling his slaves: “They were never sold by their Kentucky masters to the plantations of the South, but remained unsold down to the last day of slavery.”³⁴ But the very terms of Allen's defense are riddled with contradiction; basing the “honor” of a Kentucky planter on his “incapability” to sell a slave like “Uncle Tom,” almost a member of the family, vainly denied the obvious: slavery was traffic in human beings. “Unsold” as a description of a person testifies, in spite of Allen's claim, that slaves could be, and were, sold like chattel. In their representations of the past, these writers, then, were engaged in a convoluted act, not simply of denying the evil of slavery, but also wanting at the same time to be forgiven for the very evil that their texts steadfastly refuse to acknowledge. Thus, in Page's story, Sam's mourning for his young master should be read as a rather more complex projection of both white guilt and desire than it often has. The guilt over slavery—and possibly the continuing mistreatment of black people—is assuaged by the tears of a black man whose allforgiving love and devotion absolve his former master. Significantly, Sam's tale seems to insinuate that for the sins of slaveholding the masters sacrificed their lives and their futures: the young master is cut down in his prime, a virgin, and the old master, already blinded, but alive to see his son die before him, is symbolically stripped of all of his power even before his actual death. The implication, then, of the tale that Sam tells is that the South's old masters have gone forever; no new ones can take their place.

On yet another level, however, master-slave relations are represented as far from obsolete; indeed, they are a model for race relations in the present. The clearly white, gentlemanly narrator of this tale stands in the place of the old master. Sam's “instinctive” deference to him enacts the subordination now demanded from all blacks by any white man: “Instantly, and as if by instinct, the darky stepped forward and took my bridle” (4). In a postwar America of labor unrest, increasing immigration, and growing support for female suffrage, the appeal of such a fantasy—the “instinctive” subordination of “inferiors”—may be measured by Page's popularity outside the South. Significantly, the only moment in the story that disrupts the fantasy of blacks willingly subjugating themselves to whites is a comic one; the story begins with Sam's grumbling as he searches for his dead master's lost dog: “Jes' like white folks—think 'cuz you's white and I's black, I got to wait on yo' all de time. Ne'm mine, I ain' gwi' do it!” (3). When Sam realizes he has been overheard by a white man, he explains, “He know I don' mean nothin' by what I sez. … He know I 'se jes' prodjickin' wid 'im” (3). But this game of “prodjickin” (projection?) in which Sam openly challenges the dog, who stands in the place of the absent master, embodies black resistance in a comic form, further suggesting that the white narrator's interruption of this game and his command to be told all about “Marse Chan” is not an accidental intrusion but driven by his fear of “masterless” blacks.

What is even more troubling than the implicit endorsement of the Jim Crow system—that is, the story's invitation to the (white) reader to inhabit the gaze of the master—is the way in which the romantic story the old “servant” tells reinforces its ideology of white supremacy through homosocial bonding. P. Gabrielle Foreman has recently analyzed what she calls the “homoerotics” displayed in Harriet Beecher Stowe's depiction of the relations between Augustine St. Clare and his male slaves, including “Uncle Tom” himself. She suggests that the violent death of the “good” master as well as the sadomasochistic overtones of Tom's being beaten to death are signs of “sexual transgression,” of the “inconceivable realm of male homosocial desire.” In her reading, Eva's “presence is superfluous,” for she primarily functions as a link between men: she “is the expression of the desire over which Tom and St. Clare connect. … a classic example of the erotic triangular paradigm Sedgwick refigures, Eva (the ostensible beloved) occupies Tom (‘rival’), as St. Clare (‘rival,’ father) looks on.” She goes on to say: “When we figure only relations between female slaves and white men under slavery as a field of sexual violence and contestation, we allow ourselves to construct and maintain ideological gaps and representation silences. The ramifications of these lacunae fit into a broader set of regulations: the resistance to seeing the male body as penetrable. Dominant society's blinding desire of course perpetuates the erasure of gay identity and rights.” As Foreman notes, the sexual vulnerability of black men to white men in white-dominated society, especially under slavery, is “one of those ornate silences”; she reminds us, however, that Harriet Jacobs offers one of the few nineteenth-century testimonies to the sexual victimization of black men. Foreman's analysis suggests new ways of reading the “sentimental” relations between ex-masters and ex-slaves foregrounded in late nineteenth-century America by writers such as Page, Smith, and Allen. A pattern emerges of men's exchanging of both black and white women, pointing always to the primacy of the connection between men. However, through the domestication of the black partner, who is pictured as willingly subordinating himself to the desires of his white master, a protomodern, dominant ideology of masculinity emerges, predicated upon the repression of the possibility of mutual, homosexual desire between men.³⁵

In “Marse Chan,” the young master arranges for Sam to buy his future wife, and in return Sam literally serves as a go-between, reconciling his master and his lady love. But the women's presence merely underlines the men's bond; it is the connection between these men—Sam and Chan have been inseparable since childhood—that proves deepest; Sam follows his master unquestioningly to war, on the most dangerous missions against Yankees, and finally holds himself responsible for his master's death in battle: “I 'specks dey done kill Marse Chan, an' I promised to tek care on him” (34). Earlier, his master promises, “Sam, we'se goin' to win in dis battle, an' den we'll go home an' git married” (33). The unintentional ambiguity of this statement points to the profound intimacy between these men: “Marse Chan” and Sam are already so joined that they will even consummate their marriages, in a sense, together. Their curious bond is thus another version of the “innocent marriage” between a white man and a racial Other first discussed by Leslie Fiedler.³⁶ In southern postwar fiction, however, it is significantly not the freedom of the wilderness that allows men to bond but slavery itself, which is why black men are so often imagined as willingly reentering the relation of servitude to their former masters. Slavery is thus rewritten under the sign of love.

If Foreman's analysis is correct, the violent death of the young master in Page's story may also be read as marking a sexual transgression: a repressed desire for a forbidden consummation. The end of the story, however, represents Sam anxiously hoping consummation awaits his master in heaven: “‘Dey tells me dat de Bible sey dyar won' be marryin' nor givin' in marriage in heaven, but I don' b'lieve it signifies dat—does you?’” (38). Yet Sam's concern borders on the excessive; the sentimental hope that lovers will consummate their relationship after death sounds odd when it originates not from the lovers themselves but from the black body servant who looks on. (Indeed, he constantly represents himself as an onlooker and eavesdropper.) The forbidden triangle obliquely figured here—a black man and a white man joined through the body of a white woman—suggests that the subordination of black people, especially black men, is naturalized through Sam's desire to serve; and although this desire is coded on the surface as innocent, the homoerotics of this representation of master-slave relations may be interpreted as part of the logic of a new racial order in which all blacks must “want” to cater to all whites. Such a logic of enforced desire also prefigures what will come to be the greatest symbolic threat to this new order—black men desiring not to serve white men but to possess white women. The epidemic of lynchings of black men for supposedly having violated white women in the postwar South is all too real a reminder of how horrifying the effects of such compulsory social desires can be.³⁷

The same regulation of homosocial desire informs the postwar master-slave relations sentimentalized by Smith and Allen. In Colonel Carter of Cartersville Chad and his master live in a cosy bachelor apartment in New York City after the war, even though Chad's wife, “Mammy Henny,” is still living, back on the old place in Virginia. Chad, too, is another self-sacrificing black man, who once took a Yankee bullet in his leg in the rescue of his young master from a Union prison. And as in Page's “Marse Chan,” women are exchanged between men; here Colonel Carter's father gives Chad his wife. The only woman of significance in this story, however, is Aunt Nancy, an antiquated southern belle whose perfume of sweet lavender is “the very smell that you remember came from your own mother's old-fashioned bureau drawer when she let you stand on tiptoe to see her pretty things” (82). The triangle in this tale is decidedly an oedipal one, with Chad and Colonel Carter sharing in Aunt Nancy a quasi-maternal figure to whom they are both devoted. Significantly, even heterosexual relationships do not figure in this text. Again, the bond between the men is primary. The “odd couple” comforts of their bachelor life together in New York repeat the theme of homosocial bonding although the erotic character of this male bond is almost rendered null because of their age. One man may wear another's clothes, show his caring in the daily acts of cooking for and tending to the needs of the other, yet this quasi-marital intimacy is not depicted as a homosexual relation, but as the “natural” subordination of a black man to a white one.

James Lane Allen's representation of a black man's intimate friendship with a white man in “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky,” though, is the most remarkable of all; not only does its sentimentality almost collapse into camp, but its homoerotic character is also the most overt. In this, perhaps his most popular story, Allen also displays a protogay subjectivity.³⁸ It is important at the outset to mention two caveats. First, Allen's story is a projection by a white man of what a black man desires, and as such it tells us little, if anything, about black (homo)sexual desire; as Foreman points out, in a relation of power such as slavery where black men have been exploited by white men, their consent mattered little. And secondly, there is the danger, as Sedgwick has astutely warned, of damning a “homophobic masculinist culture … on the grounds of being even more homosexual than gay male culture.”³⁹ In other words, there is a danger of finding Allen—figured as the “true homosexual”—to be more racist and more sentimental than his contemporaries. However, although Allen is as racist and as inclined to sentimentalize black and white men's relations as his contemporaries are, his camp humor ultimately proves more destabilizing of those relations, and therefore more potentially subversive, than those imagined by Page or Smith.

“Come closer!”

Peter crept on his knees and buried his head on the colonel's thigh. “Come up here—closer;” and putting one arm around Peter's neck he laid the other hand softly on his head, and looked long and tenderly into his eyes. “I've got to leave you, Peter. Don't you feel sorry for me?” “Oh, Marse Rom!” cried Peter, hiding his face, his whole form shaken by sobs.

—James Lane Allen, “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky”

Unlike Page, Allen did not come from a slaveholding family; his father was an impoverished Kentucky farmer; in fact, one of his earliest memories is being overworked as a boy in the hemp fields.⁴⁰ Allen never married and never seems to have been interested in women; Grant C. Knight all but hints that he was gay although Knight does describe his attachments to men in strictly Platonic terms: “It would take a shrewd argument to establish his love for any woman other than a relative. … His affectional history is feminine rather than masculine … and he felt an almost sisterly attachment for a very few men whom he frankly loved as men once loved in the days of big-hearted Dick Steele.”⁴¹ “Dick Steele” refers to a piece Allen once wrote, “Always Bussing His Friends,” where he laments that the custom of men kissing and showing affection openly, once possible in the London of Steele and Addison, has no place in nineteenth-century America; the piece, which Allen signed, “A Southerner (but not a Woman),” won the gratitude of Edmund Gosse because it obliquely took his part in the uproar over an ungentlemanly attack on Gosse's literary scholarship by a friend.⁴² Yet the “literary” occasion seems inseparable from the passionate male comradeship it imagines and regrets.

In “Always Bussing His Friends,” Allen keeps conjuring up scenes that mimic both homoerotic desire and the frustration or refusal of that desire. He writes, “Up rushes Dick, his jolly round person resplendent in scarlet and gold, takes the pale student of the bookstall in his arms, hugs him, and starts to kiss him, only the other steps quickly backward with a flush on his face” (140). Gosse, though happily married, was attuned to such feelings; he later wrote to John Addington Symonds of his own repressed feelings for a male friend, “The position of a young person so tormented is really that of a man buried alive and conscious, but deprived of speech.” Later he predicted to André Gide, “No doubt, in fifty years, this particular subject will cease to surprise anyone, and how many people in the past might wish to have lived in 1974.”⁴³

When Knight wrote to Ellen Glasgow for information for his book James Lane Allen and the Genteel Tradition, she replied evasively, perhaps hinting at the familiar “open secret” of gay identity. She hopes she has been sufficiently “discreet”; she stresses that there were others who were much closer to him than she was but concludes, “The real trouble between us was that, try as hard as I could, it was impossible for me to admire his style of writing as ardently as all the sentimental young men of the nineties had admired it.”⁴⁴ Of course, it is dangerous and finally impossible to construct from these few hints a writer's psychosexual identity without, on the one hand, recreating a stereotype, and on the other, underestimating his self-awareness. Whatever Allen's own sensibility, however, the homoerotically charged relationship that he represents in “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky” is the clearest working out of the fantasy of white southern aristocratic masculinity based on the sexual and social subordination of black men.

The above deathbed scene, with Peter embracing his master's thigh and sobbing at the prospect of his loss, serves as the climax to this story of “the last steady burning-down of that pure flame of love which can never again shine out in the future of the two races” (119). In Allen's narrative, women characters, black and white, function as ideals who are conveniently dead or absent: the white southern mother dies hearing of her other son's death; the loyal black wife dies, leaving the Colonel and Peter to a delicious male companionship untroubled by women. White women are associated with a deathly purity, black women with sexuality. The Colonel's long-ago failed romance, his guarantee of heterosexuality, appears in the tale as little more than a name—“Helen,” the stereotypical belle dame sans merci. Although Peter tells his “love-story” to the Colonel (a guarantee of his heterosexuality?), the real love affair dramatized in the story is between ex-slave and ex-master. Peter, “the only one of the colonel's former slaves that had remained inseparable from his person and his altered fortunes,” is first introduced as gazing at his master “with an expression of indescribable solicitude and love” (104).

The reader is invited to identify with both the gazer and the object of the gaze—the white man. Their exquisite intercourse is a symbol of the superiority of past race relations: “No one ever saw in their intercourse ought but the finest courtesy, the most delicate consideration. … To be near them was to be exorcised of evil passions” (119). An obvious political reading of the “evil passions” that Allen invokes here is the specter of race war used by whites to justify Klan violence as well as the need for racial segregation; the idea that all white men deserve an aristocratic, superior relation to black people, we should remember, made possible the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, which attracted not only poorer white men but also men of high station and social prominence throughout the South.⁴⁵ Allen's tale, then, is congruent with the literary as well as historical interpretation of Radical Reconstruction begun by writers such as Page and given academic respectability by the so-called Dunning school: Reconstruction was judged a total failure, a time of unparalleled political corruption when greedy carpetbaggers and ignorant blacks ruled over a defeated and demoralized South until the region was redeemed by its white men.⁴⁶

But a reading that takes into account the curious excesses of this story must also explain why the tale so openly constructs a mutual, loving relation between men as a forbidden paradise. (Their tender relations are even called “a shadowy paradise” [119].) The camp humor threatening to disrupt the sentimental surface at every point only confirms that the gender and race identities that the tale seems to take for granted are at the same time revealed to be not so stable after all. To take just one example of the camp humor, their very names suggest something silly: “Romulus Fields” is bad enough, though relics of antebellum southern manhood are often equated with classical glory. Still, it is usually the ex-slave who is “Caesar” or “Pompey.” But “Peter Cotton” is an even more ridiculous name, clearly linking the ex-slave to the “cottontail” rabbit. The emphasis on Peter's “tail,” however, appears elsewhere in the story as well. Peter, once a slave preacher, had been the possessor of a miraculous blue-jeans coat, embroidered everywhere with scripture, such as “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh.” The seriousness of this already-too-much trope of Peter as text is further compromised by the word Amen, which appears in a very queer place: “But the only spot now left vacant was one of a few square inches, located just where the coat-tails hung over the end of Peter's spine; so that when any one stood full in Peter's rear, he could but marvel at the sight of so solemn a word emblazoned in so unusual a locality” (106). Noting the connection between a homosexual sensibility and camp, Sontag reads camp as “a gesture of self-legitimization” that “neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”⁴⁷ In one way, Allen's tale is the story of the decline of the white master, which shows him in the unflattering but very human light of being reduced to powdering his face and leaning on his former servant for strength and support. From this angle, southern gentility as well as black inferiority are exposed as mutually dependent constructions. But, read another way, the lugubrious deaths of these two stage a sentimental climax that both inscribes a desire for as well as a fear of sexual transgression. Yet the overdone humor here leaves racist—and homophobic—paradigms intact. If the narrator's attention to Peter's anatomy comically invokes a forbidden place of male desire, the story nevertheless makes him the butt of the story's humor.

If white southerners as well as northerners long after the Civil War found solace in tales of tender affections between ex-slaves and ex-masters, we have reason to think such narratives provided versions of manhood as well as nation that satisfied mainstream tastes. In Showalter's study of the “myths, metaphors, and images of sexual crises and apocalypse” dominating late nineteenth-century English and American culture, she argues that the threat of a “revolution by women” received the most attention in England, where “the ‘lower races’ were safely distant in Africa and India, and the poor usually well out of sight.”⁴⁸ Her analysis does not fit America nearly so well, where the freeing of the slaves after a bloody civil war, soon followed by wave upon wave of immigration, led to a different metaphorics of social breakdown. The special place of the South in the national imaginary, especially as embodied in the antebellum Plantation Myth, owes something to distinctly American fears and desires.

It is important to recognize that some writers resisted this homosocial fantasy of racial harmony. Nineteenth-century African-American male writers such as Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar did not imagine ex-slaves mooning over their former masters. Indeed, “Uncle Julius” in “The Goophered Grapevine” frankly portrays his old master as a skinflint as well as a fool. Even Dunbar's figures who grieve for their plantation past, for example, the narrator of “The Deserted Plantation,” mourn most for the community of black men and women that has been lost.⁴⁹ Yet their very need to resist indicates the “sentimental power” of this tale of interracial male bonding.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson suggests that one of the ways nationalist ideologies work is through what he calls “the reassurance of fratricide.” Bloody and intractable race and class conflicts, he argues, are often retold and “explained” as essentially family feuds, thus creating the illusion of an unbroken national continuity through a complex process of selective remembering and forgetting: “A vast pedagogical industry works ceaselessly to oblige young Americans to remember/forget the hostilities of 1861-65 as a great ‘civil’ war between ‘brothers’ rather than between—as they briefly were—two sovereign nation-states.” He adds that had the Confederacy won, “this ‘civil war’ would have been replaced in memory by something quite unbrotherly.” Part of the story, then, of remembering/forgetting the Confederacy, and with it, slavery, the South's infamous peculiar institution, is the story of the happy slave, the slave woman or man—the “Mammy” or the “Uncle Tom”—who was supposedly part of the family. Slavery is remembered/forgotten not through the eyes of the field hand, but through the more reassuring ones of those who were almost “family.” Anderson notes that “the first indelible image of black and white as American ‘brothers’” is “Jim and Huck companionably adrift on the wide Mississippi,” but “the setting is a remembered/forgotten antebellum in which the black is still a slave.”⁵⁰

Yet gender and race cannot be left out of an analysis of such “brotherly” constructions. As Sedgwick and Foreman remind us, the construction of white, heterosexual masculinity makes relations between men, especially between men of different skin colors, fraught with meaning. The postwar creation of the Colonel and his devoted ex-slave may be read as a complicated ideological renegotiation of masculine as well as national identity. If owning black people is no longer American and the southern white patriarch's power is correspondingly diminished, these narratives also reinscribe the necessity for blacks—especially black men—to subordinate themselves to whites; blacks can only become the “gentlemen” of Allen's and Smith's stories when they fully accept their status as social inferiors. By the same token, however, if owning black people is truly no longer American, if blacks potentially, like white women, are masterless, modern white masculine identity can no longer be constructed as a straightforward fable of mastery. This is why so many of these stories compare the Colonel to crumbling, ancient Greek temples, signs of patriarchal privilege under pressure. Thus, the excessive, the “too much” qualities of these stories, whether sentimental or bordering on camp, are especially ambiguous. They register the strain of the effort to recoup white male power, even as they admit that the terms of that power can never be the same.

Yet the hold of sentimental images such as the Colonel over America has proved strong; the staying power of the image may be measured in the millions made by Colonel Sanders, who recycled this figure once more to sell fast food.⁵¹ Hence, fast food, that most democratic of American inventions, is repackaged as upper-class, genuine southern cooking through the figure of Colonel Sanders. If, because of Kentucky Fried Chicken, the figure of the Kentucky Colonel is now more kitsch than sentimental or even camp, that does not lessen the historical or mythic importance of this incarnation of white southern manhood.⁵² James Lane Allen's exploration of this figure as half of a tender, interracial male couple suggests that the sentimental in the Plantation Myth could not be fully domesticated; even in the nineteenth century, it contained at least the camp potential to destabilize modern identities predicated upon white men being “naturally” superior and invariably heterosexual.⁵³

Notes

1. For the classic study of the masculine ideal as southern aristocrat, see William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Braziller, 1961). See also Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986).

2. See Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985).

3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985).

4. Elaine Showalter takes the phrase “sexual anarchy” from George Gissing for the title of her book Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990).

5. Robyn R. Warhol notes that it is critics who have christened Stowe's hero “Little Eva,” evoking “Little Nell,” although the narrator calls her simply “Eva” or “Evangeline” (Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel [New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1989], 215n).

6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 146.

7. In his biography, Tilden G. Edelstein remarks that “it is very unlikely that the urbane Higginson literally shed tears, as Edward Channing mockingly claimed (and others have repeated) over the death of the slave owner in Thomas Nelson Page's portrayal of kindly master and loyal slave in ‘Marse Chan,’” adding, “It is true, however, that he had come to give greater credence to Page's account of slavery than Theodore Weld's or Mrs. Stowe's” (Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968], 388).

8. Edelstein argues that this political evolution is less contradictory than it seems; acting in the tradition of his forefathers, Puritan ministers, Higginson condemned slavery but believed in the necessity of an educated elite to govern. According to Edelstein, “Higginson was remarkably consistent—history less so” (399). It is ironic, but wholly consistent with his views, that a man at the forefront of the antislavery fight should later doubt the wisdom of black suffrage and advise the nascent N.A.A.C.P. to “conciliate the more progressive class of southern white citizens” (392).

9. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 132.

10. Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination, rev. ed. (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986), 165.

11. Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and the Accuracy of a Tradition (1924; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962), 63. However, Gaines's bias is toward the rosier view of the Old South. Despite admitting that many stock features of the Plantation Myth were “a dramatization of the lurid, the volatile, the sensational” (187) in plantation life, he swallows most of it whole: “It seems entirely probable that the average black on the Southern estate was, in moderate degree, happy and loyal” (224).

12. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South: 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1961), 155.

13. Ibid., 157.

14. Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., Yeoman versus Cavalier: The Old Southwest's Fictional Road to Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1993), 127.

15. See, for example, Susan Gillman, “The Mulatto, Tragic or Triumphant? The Nineteenth-Century American Race Melodrama,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 221-43.

16. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1961), 285.

17. All three, however, preferred urban life: Allen never returned to the Kentucky he celebrated, living most of his life in New York City as did Smith, and Page cut a fashionable figure in the nation's capital after his second marriage to a wealthy widow, Florence Lathrop Field.

18. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 283.

19. Ibid., 285.

20. Page went so far as to claim that the South “owed her final defeat” to a “lack of a literature”: “she was conquered by the pen rather than by the sword; and how unavailing against the resources of the world, which the North commanded through the sympathy it had enlisted, was the valiance of that heroic army, which, if courage could have availed, had withstood the universe” (“The Old South,” The Old South: Essays Social and Political [New York: Scribners, 1908], 59-60). He devoted himself to a “career not less glorious: the true recording of that story, of that civilization whose history has never yet been written—the history of the Old South” (61).

21. David Bergman, Introduction, Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 9.

22. For an analysis critical of Sontag's desire to view camp as apolitical, see Marcie Frank, “The Critic as Performance Artist: Susan Sontag's Writing and Gay Culture,” in Bergman, Camp Grounds, 173-84. Philip Core, Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth (New York: Delilah Books, 1984), 9.

23. Core, The Lie That Tells the Truth, 41.

24. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 139.

25. Thomas Nelson Page, “Marse Chan,” In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories, intro. Kimball King (1887; rpt. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), 59; all subsequent page references are to this edition, a facsimile printing of the first edition of 1887, and appear parenthetically in the text. F. Hopkinson Smith, Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1895; rpt. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1919), 77; subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text.

    King focuses on the blindness of the old planter in Page's story as symbolic of his inability to see the flaws of slavery (xxii). In Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980), Wayne Mixon points out that F. Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter “is often little more than a buffoon” (45). Neither, however, explores the symbolic emasculation of these figures.

26. James Lane Allen, “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky,” Flute and Violin and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances (1891; rpt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1898), 113. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. The tale was first published as “Two Kentucky Gentlemen of the Old School” in Century Magazine 35 (1888): 945-57.

27. Ross, No Respect, 145.

28. Ibid., 147.

29. Mixon, Southern Writers, 32-33, 41-42.

30. According to Grant C. Knight, James Lane Allen and the Genteel Tradition (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1935), the Allens liked to claim descent from English gentry through their Virginia ancestors (9). But he grew up not the son of a rich slaveholder but of a relatively poor farmer.

31. Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia (New York: Scribners, 1897), 43.

32. Jay B. Hubbell was among the first to stress the “debt which the literature of the New South owes to the editors of Northern literary magazines” (The South in American Literature, 1607-1900 [Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1954], 730). For example, it was a northern editor who first directed Allen to write about Kentucky (John Wilson Townsend, James Lane Allen: A Personal Note [Louisville: Kentucky Courier-Journal Job Printing Co., 1928], 25-26).

33. Woodward, for example, comments upon the appreciation southerners lavished upon Page: “What bitter-sweet tears washed Nashville's grimy cheeks over Page's In Ole Virginia! ‘Dem wuz good ole times, marster—de bes Sam ever see! Dey wuz in fac'! Niggers didn' hed nothin' 'tall to do’” (Origins of the New South, 167). Lucinda H. MacKethan singles out the same lines in The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980) as “the most important testament of all to the beneficent effect of the plantation setting on its inhabitants” (45).

34. James Lane Allen, “Mrs. Stowe's ‘Uncle Tom’ at Home in Kentucky,” Century Magazine 34 (1887): 852-67, 853.

35. P. Gabrielle Forman, “‘This Promiscuous Housekeeping’: Death, Transgression, and Homoeroticism in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Representations 43 (summer 1993): 51-72; 52, 62, 67, and 71, n. 49).

36. See Leslie A. Fiedler's now classic Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966). For his more recent assessment of his famous thesis, see his What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); in this book, he analyzes the sadomasochistic overtones of Uncle Tom's death as a kind of “connubial murder and rape” (175).

37. For an astute analysis of what rape means in American culture, see Susan Fraiman, “Geometries of Race and Gender: Eve Sedgwick, Spike Lee, Charlayne Hunter-Gault,” Feminist Studies 20 (1994): 67-84. Fraiman contends that “one paradigm of American racism, available during slavery but crystallized in the period following Reconstruction and still influential today” is the one “in which white men's control of Black men is mediated by the always-about-to-be-violated bodies of white women” (70-71).

38. Roger Austen, Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), explores the late nineteenth-century roots of explicitly gay fiction in the work of Bayard Taylor, Charles Warren Stoddard, and other writers of the period (1-20).

39. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 154.

40. Allen remembers working with his father in the fields: “Backward and forward, backward and forward, across the soft brown earth he rode, sowing the hemp. I dropped corn, covered it, thinned it (an abominable business, I thought, working a boy's back as though he were a pair of sugar tongs)” (Townsend, James Lane Allen, 14).

41. Knight, James Lane Allen and The Genteel Tradition, 39-40.

42. James Allen, “Always Bussing His Friends,” in Townsend, James Lane Allen, 140-42; Townsend reprints the piece from The Critic (3 March 1888). Subsequent references to the story are cited parenthetically within the essay. Townsend also reprints Gosse's enthusiastic letter to Joseph B. Gilder about Allen's essay (26-27). Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape 1849-1928 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1984), discusses the “scandal of the year” caused by the attack of John Churton Collins on Gosse (276-97).

43. In “Always Bussing His Friends,” Allen comments, “Had I been his [Samuel Johnson's] contemporary and loved him as well as Boswell, I should never have offered to kiss Dr. Johnson, and I certainly should have resisted to the utmost limits of my strength every effort of the part of Dr. Johnson to kiss me. Nor would any earthly consideration have induced me to stoop to Pope” (141). Thwaite, Edmund Gosse, 320-21; she speculates that Gosse may have deliberately wanted his letters to Symonds, and their confession of his homosexual feelings, to survive.

44. Letters of Ellen Glasgow, ed. Blair Rouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 93-94.

45. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 425-44.

46. Foner notes that the Dunning school's version of Reconstruction was influential even up until the 1960s, when W. E. B. Du Bois's earlier findings in Black Reconstruction that Reconstruction was not a total failure, but “an idealistic effort to construct a democratic, interracial political order,” at last began to gain acceptance (xxi). Foner concludes that the effort to create a “democratic, interracial” order did not succeed but not because of incompetent black rulers or northern carpetbaggers; he suggests that freed blacks, together with northerners and southern unionists, failed to create an egalitarian social order out of the ruins of slavery for complex reasons, including the intransigence of the old southern ruling class but also the contradictory policies of the reformers themselves.

47. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 292.

48. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 6.

49. Joanne B. Braxton, Introduction, The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1993), also suggests that a poem like “The Deserted Plantation” must be read “from inside out”: from this vantage, the narrator is not so simple, but imagined “in an Afrocentric environment” where black folks “enjoy each other's company and where they are self-identified rather than focused on the master” (xxvii).

50. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 199, 201, and 203.

51. Lisa Howorth in her entry for the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), notes that “to people all over the world the words ‘It's finger lickin' good’ evoke the image of a quintessential southerner, the Kentucky colonel, personified by Harland David Sanders” (750). She adds that Sanders was not a native southerner and became a colonel only through the commission of the governor, who traditionally bestows the title for community service or as a political favor. The company he popularized through this southern mythic figure, however, was worth ＄850 million when Pepsico bought it in 1986 (751).

52. Ross distinguishes between kitsch and camp; kitsch, from the German for pseudoart, is pretentious and usually “contains a range of references to high or legitimate culture which it apes in order to flatter its owner-consumer” (No Respect, 145).

53. See Chuck Kleinhaus, “Taking Out the Trash: Camp and the Politics of Parody,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London: Routledge, 1994), 182-201, on camp's potential as an agent of liberating social transformation.